About 75 percent of companies plan to give their workers year-end bonuses this year, up from 67 percent last year, according to a survey of 500 HR executives at firms of various sizes. The average bonus is expected to be 25 percent larger than last year's offerings — about $1,081, up from $858 in 2015. The quarter of firms who said they aren't giving out holiday bonuses "had financial performance issues or were concerned about the U.S. economic outlook," The Wall Street Journal reports, but about half of that group still said they hope to give out other morale-boosting gifts like extra paid time off.

This year, Amazon is adding 120,000 temporary workers at its U.S. warehouses for the holiday season, expanding its workforce by about 40 percent. The e-tail giant is also dramatically speeding up its orientation process, The Wall Street Journal reports. While conventional warehouse jobs usually require up to six weeks of training, the company has been using technology such as touchscreens, robots, and scanners to get new hires up to speed in as little as two days. While Amazon's newest warehouses are extremely automated and filled to the brim with robots that do much of the heavy lifting, "the greater efficiency allows them to process even more orders, a task that still requires humans."

A shorter training period saves Amazon a lot of money and could potentially allow the company to pay employees more during these hectic winter months — a crucial lure Amazon needs as it competes with rivals like Walmart and package delivery services like UPS who are also looking for seasonal help. Amazon's holiday temps typically make more than minimum wage.

The Federal Reserve has for months toyed with the idea of raising interest rates, repeatedly suggested rate hikes are forthcoming, and then backed off when economic forecasts offer a less sunny context than the central bank would prefer for its next move. But if the Fed does move ahead with its plans, the United States might also experience a bump from its current crime rates, which are at a historic low.

There's no direct causal relationship, of course, but crime rates offer a remarkably consistent mirror of interest rates over the past six decades. Social scientists argue that higher interest rates lead to economic stress, including job losses, and that in turn makes crime more likely. Increased divorce, suicide, and alcoholism are also correlated with greater economic stress.

Just days after President-elect Donald Trump publicly criticized Boeing, it was announced that the aircraft manufacturer has pledged $1 million to help cover costs for Trump's inaugural events. Boeing, notably, donated the same amount to President Obama's inaugural events in 2013, and it committed its donation to Trump prior to this week's events.

Still, the donation suggests Trump's tweeting hasn't soured relations between Boeing, which has a contract with the government to develop the next Air Force One, and America's next president. Trump on Tuesday criticized Boeing for the "out of control" costs of its Air Force One project, and even suggested the government "cancel" the order.

That prompted Boeing chief executive Dennis Muilenberg to reach out to Trump later that same day to assure him costs would be kept under control. The next day, Trump said in an interview with MSNBC that Muilenberg is a "very good man," and that he is certain they were "going to work it out."

Muilenberg confirmed in an email to USA Today that Boeing is "pleased to continue our tradition of supporting presidential inaugurations."

As the presidential election was winding down, then-candidate Donald Trump was feeding millions of dollars into his campaign — and his family's businesses. The latest Federal Election Commission disclosure, which tracks from Oct. 20 to Nov. 28, reveals Trump paid his family-owned businesses nearly $2.9 million during that period of time.

Some of the payments occurred after Election Day, and some, The Wall Street Journal pointed out, "appear to be routine payments for rent and payroll" as well as air travel. Not all of the payments seemed to be "routine" though:

The campaign also paid $4,275 to the Trump International Golf Club in Bedminster County, New Jersey, for "lodging” on Nov. 22, the weekend Mr. Trump holed up there to interview potential Cabinet nominees. That same weekend, the campaign paid $6,850 to Eric Trump's wine manufacturing company for "facility rental and catering services." [The Wall Street Journal]

All in all, The Wall Street Journalreported Trump's spending on family businesses in the weeks immediately before and after the election amounted to "a third of the total amount he had previously paid his businesses over the course of the campaign." In total, Trump spent about $12 million on family-owned companies and his kids' travel expenses.

President-elect Donald Trump took a moment at his victory tour rally Thursday night to defend his selection of several billionaires and millionaires for his Cabinet. "One newspaper criticized me: 'Why can't they have people of modest means?'" Trump said, while speaking in Des Moines, Iowa. "Because I want people that made a fortune! Because now they're negotiating with you, okay?"

Trump has not yet finished making appointments, but already his Cabinet is shaping up to be one of the wealthiest ever. Trump's pick for commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, is worth an estimated $2.5 billion; Betsy DeVos, who Trump tapped for education secretary, comes from a family worth $5.1 billion; and Trump's pick for head of the Small Business Administration, Linda McMahon, and her husband have an estimated net worth of $1.16 billion.

But, Trump said Thursday, these billionaires are going to put money-making on hold to join his administration. "These people have given up fortunes of income in order to make a dollar a year, and they're so proud to do it, and you watch, you watch what's gonna happen," he said. "It's gonna happen fast, too."

Watch Trump make his case below.

Pres.-elect Donald Trump on why he doesn't appoint people of 'modest means': "I want people that made a fortune." https://t.co/MHeCcYKAPa

President-elect Donald Trump got into a high-profile Twitter spat on Wednesday with Chuck Jones, the president of the United Steelworkers local that represents the union workers at the Carrier furnace plant where Trump intervened to save jobs. Jones had criticized Trump for claiming 1,100 jobs would be kept in Indiana instead of the roughly 800 jobs that actually won't be sent to Mexico. It turns out, even those 800 jobs won't all stay in Indianapolis for long, according to the CEO of Carrier's parent company, United Technologies, and the reason is the other part of the Trump-brokered deal.

"We're going to make a $16 million investment in that factory in Indianapolis to automate, to drive the cost down so that we can continue to be competitive," United Technologies CEO Greg Hayes told CNBC's Jim Cramer this week. "Now, is it as cheap as moving to Mexico with lower-cost labor? No. But we will make that plant competitive just because we'll make the capital investments there. But what that ultimately means is there will be fewer jobs." You can watch the relevant part of the interview starting at about the 12:50 mark:

United Technologies isn't alone in building robots to replace manual labor. U.S. factories are actually producing more goods today than in the post-World War II boom — domestic factory output has risen 150 percent in the past 40 years, according to Federal Reserve data — but U.S. manufacturing jobs have contracted by more than 30 percent in the same period, thanks largely to automation, CNNMoney notes, arguing that "automation is the only way that a plant in Indiana that pays about $20 an hour can compete with Mexican plants where workers earn $3 an hour."

"You can't just blame cheap labor" in Mexico and other countries, LNS research analyst Dan Miklovic tells CNNMoney. "Certainly many of the jobs that we've lost, especially in more sophisticated industries, it's not so much that they've been offshored, but it has been automation that replaced them. We use a lot more robots to build cars."

On Thursday, the House approved a bill to finance the federal government until April 28, by a 329-96 vote, but Senate Democrats may force a brief government shutdown over a provision to fund the health care of retired coal miners. The current bill includes a four-month extension of the miners' health benefits, set to lapse on Jan. 1 for at least 12,500 union miners and their families, but Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) says he will "do everything I can to stop" the spending bill if it doesn't have a one-year extension, so lawmakers can work out a permanent fix for the miners' badly underfunded pension fund. "Nobody wants to close this great institution, this government down," he said. "But you've got to stand for something or sure to God you'll stand for nothing."

Manchin has support from other Democrats and even some Republicans, notably Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.). Republican leaders say the Democrats are fighting a losing battle on miners' health care and lost all leverage after the House passed the spending bill and left town for the Christmas holiday. "The House just took its last votes of the year," said AshLee Strong, spokeswoman for House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). "They're not going to get what they want," Sen. John Cornyn (Texas), the No. 2 Senate Republican, said of Manchin and his fellow Democrats. "They ought to actually be grateful for what they got." Manchin and several other of the coal-state Democrats are up for re-election in 2018.

Democrats pointed out that President-elect Donald Trump pledged to support coal miners during the campaign, and also a "Buy American" provision that was not included in a separate water infrastructure bill. A meeting on Thursday afternoon strengthened Democratic resolve to block the measure, though incoming Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he "can't predict the exact path" they'll use to win the fight. Current spending runs out at midnight Friday, and Democrats can use procedural measures to block the bill until at least Sunday night.

Republican leaders in Congress had planned to fund the federal government for fiscal 2017 though separate spending bills hammered out in committee, but after Trump won they decided on an omnibus package so they could pass more favorable spending legislation without the threat of President Obama's veto.

When The New Celebrity Apprentice, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, debuts early next year, President-elect Donald Trump's name will appear in the credits as executive producer, right after series creator Mark Burnett. Trump will get more than just credit: He will also receive a fee for every episode that's "likely to be in the low five-figures, at minimum," Variety reports, noting that MGM, not NBC, will be paying Trump — MGM, Burnett's company, produces the reality TV show, and NBC licenses and broadcasts it.

"Mr. Trump has a big stake in the show and conceived of it with Mark Burnett," Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks said Thursday, confirming that she was referring to a financial stake but giving no details about the arrangement. MGM and NBC declined comment when contacted by several news organizations. NBC had said it was "ending its business relationship" with Trump in July 2015, after he launched his presidential campaign by calling many Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals. In May 2016, Trump signaled that he was still invested in the show. "You know I have a big chunk of that show, going forever," he said. "Mark and I did it together. We were 50-50 partners."

President Obama received royalties for books he wrote before taking office, but "the fact that a sitting president will be on the payroll of a current TV show is another example of the thicket of potential conflicts of interest raised by Trump's segue from private businessman and TV star to commander-in-chief," Variety says. Ethics experts, already dismayed that Trump appears unwilling to divest himself of his business, threw up their hands at the reality TV deal. "We need him to be president — full time — and not to have other contractual commitments elsewhere," Richard Painter, ethics counsel to former President George W. Bush, told The Washington Post. "He's testing the limits on everything."

Still, reality TV is a big part of Trump's story — The Apprentice saved his business career in many ways — and the skills he mastered in the medium have served him well in politics, The Washington Post notes: "Even his transition has been marked by the kind of drama that, while abnormal for the practice of building a government, is familiar to fans of the show. Just as Apprentice contestants had to battle for Trump's approval, potential Cabinet picks are publicly competing with each other and paraded before cameras at Trump Tower."

Only 51 percent of 30-year-old Americans make more money than their parents did at the same age, economists and sociologists from Stanford, Harvard, and the University of California have learned. The results of their study reflect a shocking decline from four decades prior, when 92 percent of American 30-year-olds in 1970 earned more than their parents did at a similar age.

"My parents thought that one thing about America is that their kids could do better than they were able to do," Raj Chetty, an economist on the research team who emigrated from India at age 9, told The Wall Street Journal. "That was important in my parents' decision to come here."

It isn't immediately clear why Americans aren't earning as much, but economic growth and the widening income gap are likely causes. Regardless, reversing the trend is a daunting task: "If income distribution remains as tilted toward the wealthy as it is now, [the researchers] calculate, it would take sustained growth of more than 6 percent a year, adjusted for inflation, to return to an era where nearly all children outearned their parents," The Wall Street Journal notes. "Since World War II, the U.S. hasn't experienced anything near that level of growth for a lengthy period of time."

Donald Trump and his allies spent the bulk of the presidential campaign criticizing the "donor class," but at least six of Trump's top appointees so far have been direct or indirect contributors to his campaign, Adam Smith of the nonprofit political advocacy group Every Voice pointed out on Twitter:

Andrew Puzder, who was selected by Trump as labor secretary Thursday, "gave $10,000 to pro-Trump super PAC Rebuilding America Now in August," CNBC reports. "He also donated $75,000 to a Trump joint fundraising committee with the Republican Party and gave the maximum $2,700 to Trump's campaign in May." Steven Mnuchin, Trump's treasury secretary, is also a donor, having given $2,700 to Trump's presidential campaign. Trump's secretary of commerce, Wilbur Ross Jr., is described as a "donor and longtime associate of Trump's," by NPR. Additionally, Ross "helped [Trump] resurrect his casino company after it went bankrupt in the early 1990s." And the Chicago Tribunereports that Todd Ricketts' family spent "$1 million to back Trump's presidential bid." Ricketts was recently tapped for deputy commerce secretary.

Betsy DeVos, who is Trump's pick for education secretary, is described by The New Yorker in such a way: "It would be hard to find a better representative of the 'donor class' than DeVos, whose family has been allied with Charles and David Koch for years." Finally, Linda McMahon, whom Trump named Wednesday as the head of the Small Business Administration, donated $6 million to Trump's super PAC, Rebuilding America Now, in August and September, The Washington Post reports.

President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for labor secretary is reportedly Andy Puzder, CEO of the company that owns burger joints Hardee's and Carl's Jr. Puzder has been an advocate for rolling back regulations in the restaurant industry, and he has expressed opposition to the Affordable Care Act and raising the federal minimum wage. He has also shown an interest in "employee-free" restaurants, because machines, unlike people, "always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case," Puzder said, per Business Insider.

A spokesman for the International Franchise Association, a trade group for which Puzder is on the board, said Puzder will "likely call for tools such as an overhaul of the tax system" as opposed to "focusing on stepping up workplace regulation to create jobs and higher wages," The Wall Street Journalreported.

President-elect Donald Trump's chief of staff, Reince Priebus, cracked a joke at a Manhattan fundraiser Wednesday night that might not go over too well with advocates for civil rights and women's rights, Politico reports. Trump will be such a good president that his face will one day go on the $20 bill, Priebus suggested to the audience.

The joke comes at a particularly sensitive time, as anti-slavery icon Harriet Tubman has been proposed to replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill — a plan that is threatened by Trump's presidency. Trump has previously called the idea of replacing Jackson with Tubman "pure political correctness," and countered that another denomination might be better for Tubman, such as the $2 bill.

"We certainly are worried, when Trump won the election, that he might try to make good on his suggestion that Harriet Tubman be put on the $2 bill instead of the $20 bill. It would be a slap in the face of women to reverse the decision in our opinion," the executive director of Women on 20s, Susan Ades Stone, told MarketWatch.

Meanwhile, Canada just announced that it is putting a Canadian woman on its new bank notes for the first time.

Canadian Minister of Finance Bill Morneau announced Thursday that the nation will put civil rights icon Viola Desmond on its new $10 bill. Desmond is the first Canadian woman to be featured on the nation's bank notes.

A black Nova Scotian, Desmond refused to leave the whites-only section of a movie theater in 1946, an event that helped spark the Canadian civil rights movement. The incident occurred nine years before U.S. civil rights activist Rosa Parks made a similar statement on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

Morneau said in his announcement that Desmond's story "will remind all of us, and future generations, that big change can start with small moments of dignity and bravery."

During an on-the-record interview with Time magazine last week, President-elect Donald Trump's mind flitted to his plans to keep jobs in the U.S. "Hey, Reince, I want to get a list of companies that have announced they're leaving," Trump said to incoming White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, mid-interview with Time for his Person of the Year feature, which was published Wednesday.

Trump indicated that once he'd received that list of companies looking to ship jobs overseas, he'd take matters into his own hands. "I can call them myself," Trump said to Priebus. "Five minutes apiece. They won't be leaving. Okay?" Time's Michael Scherer observed, "He was talking as if he had just realized — at that moment, in the middle of an interview — that he had the power to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail."

While an on-the-record interview might have been an unconventional moment for the discussion, it would make sense that jobs were on Trump's mind when he sat down with Time: He had just cut a deal with Carrier, convincing the air conditioning and furnace manufacturer to keep hundreds of jobs in the U.S. that had been slated to move to Mexico.

Though personally reaching out to each and every company might be one way for Trump to fulfill his campaign promises, TheHuffington Postpointed out that the president-elect is "going to be on the phone for many hours, because Carrier's case is not at all unusual." TheHuffington Postreported that "this year, the U.S. Labor Department has certified petitions for Trade Adjustment Assistance for workers at more than 1,000 firms cutting jobs due to foreign trade."

Former U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage was the original Mr. Brexit — both an inspiration to, and an admirer of, President-elect Donald Trump. But now he's getting nervous: "I suspect we will leave the Union," Farage told Bloomberg BusinessWeek. "But what terms we'll leave on, I'm getting increasingly nervous about. Nervous that we'll sell out. Nervous that we'll get half a Brexit."

In that regard, Trump's surprise win — and threat to weaken multilateral organizations — could be an unexpected life preserver for Farage:

“I'm trying to make the case," [Farage] said, "that a big, positive signal from a Trump administration that says they want a bilateral trade deal with the United Kingdom, that comes relatively early, would really be very good news."

Such a move would upend U.S. policy toward the U.K. and the European Union. In April, President Obama visited London to lay out the dire economic consequences he said would befall the U.K. if it voted to leave the EU in June's referendum. "Maybe, at some point down the line, there might be a [bilateral] U.K.-U.S. trade agreement," Obama said. “But it's not going to happen anytime soon, because our focus is on negotiating with a big bloc — the European Union — to get a trade agreement done." If Britons voted for Brexit, Obama warned, the U.K. would wind up a diminished partner, relegated to "the back of the queue."

Farage's proposal would move the U.K. to the front of the queue, sweep away the whole Obama-Clinton chessboard, roil the global economy, and, with great fanfare, imprint the Trump stamp on U.S. trade policy, possibly even before he's sworn in — all things that would seem to appeal to the president-elect. [Bloomberg BusinessWeek]

Read more about Farage's hopes for the U.S. president-elect, and what they could mean for the U.K., at Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

President-elect Donald Trump is reportedly exploring how to turn his business over to his adult sons, Eric and Donald Jr., but plans to keep a stake in the real estate empire and will not heed calls to divest, The New York Times reports. People who were briefed on the discussions said that Ivanka Trump would also leave the Trump Organization, likely to assume a role in Washington, and that Ivanka and her father are exploring a "legal structure" to separate them from the company.

Critics have pointed out that any way in which Trump might have a continued financial interest in his organization could result in conflicts and questions. The Office of Government Ethics has reportedly informed Trump's lawyers that ethical concerns can only be avoided with a divestiture.

Trump has defended himself to reporters, stating that "the law's totally on my side." Still, he will have to navigate laws that prohibit government officials from accepting gifts or payments from foreign governments, with even foreign diplomats staying at his properties being a cause for scrutiny.

"There are ways to make it work legally, but the appearances are going to be terrible and it's going to be a four-year ethical challenge," said former chief White House ethics lawyer Richard W. Painter.

Los Angeles. This 2013 five-bedroom, open-plan house lies in the Beverly Grove neighborhood. Features include an Italian kitchen, floor-to-ceiling glass, a master suite with a balcony offering city views, and a Creston home system that controls security, climate, light, and sound.

Pocket doors lead out to a backyard patio with a fireplace and heated infinity pool. $3,250,000. Brien Varady, Deasy Penner, (213) 500-4585.

Savannah, Georgia. Built in 2016, this four-bedroom home is set in the city's Victorian District. The house has a floating staircase, a gourmet kitchen with Kitchen Aid appliances, and smart-home technology.

The property includes a two-car garage and a private courtyard with an in-ground pool. $799,900. Jessica Kelly, Engel & Völkers, (912) 238-0874.

Menlo Park, California. This five-bedroom home was built this year. The house features 10-foot ceilings, wide-plank wood floors, glass-panel stair railings, a whole-house ventilation system, and a floating gas fireplace.

A fence surrounds a large deck, a lawn, and modern landscaping. $2,498,000. The Sharp Group, Keller Williams Peninsula Estates/Top Agent Network, (650) 766-5333.

Kirkland, Washington. This five-bedroom, open-plan home overlooks Lake Washington. The ultra-modern house has Italian design elements, oversize glass windows, and a kitchen with Miele appliances, and is smart-wired with iPads.

San Francisco. Set in the Diamond Heights neighborhood, this five-bedroom 1978 home has been gutted and rebuilt from the studs. The house has a marble kitchen, white-oak floors, a yoga room, a media room, and a master suite.

Outdoor features include a front deck, a back balcony, and views of the East Bay. $2,899,000. Leon De-Levi and Polina De-Levi, Pacific Union/Christie's International Real Estate, (415) 235-4652 and (415) 345-3097.

Element 1. This single modular unit was created by Chris Pardo Design. The 920-square-foot home with expansive windows has one bedroom and one bath.

A home-automation package can be added to control audio, temperature, lighting, blinds, and security. From $145,900. Method Homes, (206) 789-5553.

America has a fake news problem. And it's being exacerbated by the right's long-running distrust of the mainstream media.

In the early days of the conservative movement, many on the right led an often justifiable effort to highlight very real signs of liberal ideological bias in mainstream news outlets. But since then, this obsession with media bias has become an impulse, a tick, a reflex so sensitive to stimuli that it's in a constant state of reactive spasm. Visit any right-of-center website or blog — or follow leading conservative writers, or really any politically engaged conservative, on Twitter — and you're bound to encounter regular eruptions of furious outrage aimed at the mainstream media for its supposedly pervasive bias, double standards, blind spots, errors, and expressions of outright disdain toward conservatives.

Might the constant drumbeat of abuse hurled at journalists — recently echoed and amplified at campaign rallies by the victorious Republican nominee for president — contribute to making conservative voters more inclined to doubt the veracity of professionally edited reporting and analysis, as well as more likely to believe in the nonsense generated and publicized by "fake news" sites? Incontestably so.

But most conservatives who train their fire on the mainstream media do so in the name of the truth. Most really do believe that many journalists are biased and that they could and should be doing a better, fairer job of nailing down the facts and covering the political scene. This means that their criticism of the media is perfectly compatible with — nay, that it presumes and upholds — the crucial distinction between real and fake news.

The same cannot be said for the growing number of professional and freelance media critics on the right who've taken to labeling as "fake news" any example of mainstream journalism that shows any sign of bias, sloppiness, or error. So if a news outlet incorrectly reports that African-American teenager Michael Brown said "Hands up, don't shoot!" before he was shot and killed by white officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, that counts as fake news. As does the discredited and retracted Rolling Stonestory about a gang rape (that never took place) at the University of Virginia. As does a post-election Newsweek feature that quotes essays pre-written by journalists when they assumed Hillary Clinton would prevail in the November election.

Let me be blunt: This is pure sophistry — the use of rhetoric and reasoning for the express purpose of manipulation and deception. It is crucially important to the civic health of our nation that the distinction between fake news and every other kind of news, however flawed and misleading, be stringently upheld.

Doing so isn't difficult. It's extremely simple, in fact. Genuinely fake news can be defined by a single attribute: It intends to deceive. Real news does not.

None of those news items are real. They're all fake. The people who wrote those stories never thought they were reporting actual events that had actually happened. Their intent was always to fabricate and deceive.

Compare such mendacity to the supposed "fake news" example that right-wingers on social media highlight so frequently: the Michael Brown "Hand's up, don't shoot" claim. It's true that this false story was widely circulated by mainstream news outlets in the days following Brown's death. It's also true that it contributed to the outbreak of (sometimes violent) protests in Ferguson and elsewhere over the following weeks and months.

That's bad, obviously.

But it doesn't mean that the media outlets that spread the story were trying to deceive their readers and listeners by spreading information they knew to be lies. On the contrary, they were covering the news as they understood it at the time, relying on the statements of "Witness 101" (Brown's friend Dorian Johnson) after the shooting. The Department of Justice report on events in Ferguson, released months later, made clear that Johnson's claims were contradicted by ballistic and DNA evidence, as well as by testimony of other witnesses. He either intentionally lied or inadvertently distorted the truth, and journalists accepted his statements as fact.

Once again, that's bad, and it had terrible consequences. But it was a mistake. An example of sloppiness. It might even be treated as a case study of journalists displaying confirmation bias — accepting the truth of witness statements that would have been subjected to greater scrutiny if they didn't confirm prior assumptions (like that white cops resort to deadly violence too quickly in their confrontations with black male suspects).

Concede it all. Go ahead and skip over the rest of the DOJ Ferguson report, which confirmed that black residents in the city do, in fact, face a multitude of injustices in their dealings with the police. Disconnect Brown's fate from the numerous other deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of white police officers in communities around the country in the months surrounding the shooting. All of it should contribute to our efforts to make sense of the racial issues that so deeply divide the country. But none of it is significant in assessing whether the press should have treated as true (without corroboration) Johnson's incendiary claims about what happened at the moment Brown was shot and killed. There is no excuse or justification for that.

But that doesn't make it "fake news." Reporters didn't make things up out of whole cloth, concocting fictions out of thin air and then peddling them as facts. That is what producers of genuinely fake news are doing every day on multiple media platforms, and it is categorically different than what happens when a news outlet shows insufficient vigilance in applying standards of skepticism to eyewitness testimony or the claims of sources. A journalist aims at the truth and sometimes falls short of it. A producer of fake news aims to spread lies for the sake of advancing an agenda, reaping profits, or both.

In blurring the line between real (albeit flawed) news and fake news, right-wing commentators are engaging in obfuscation. In the process, they actively contribute to the same epistemological chaos of which fake news is both a cause and a symptom. They need to stop.

Your little artist now can draw in three dimensions. With the children's version of the first 3D pen, which safely melts biodegradable plastic, even a routine butterfly drawing becomes a stand-alone sculpture. Buy it at Amazon.

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President-elect Donald Trump tweeted out some criticism of United Steelworkers Local 1999 president Chuck Jones less than a minute after Jones, who represents Carrier factory workers in Indianapolis, appeared on CNN's Erin Burnett OutFront to talk about how Trump had inflated the number of jobs being retained in Indiana. The chyron underneath him referenced a quote Jones gave to The Washington Post: "Trump 'lied his a** off'"

After Trump tweeted out that Jones "has done a terrible job," Burnett got Jones back on the phone. "That wasn't very damned nice, but with Donald Trump saying that, that must mean I'm doing a good job," he said, noting that Trump has tried to keep unions out of his hotels and casinos. "I don't put a whole hell of a lot of faith in whatever he says, because I just don't pay a hell of a lot of attention to him."

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich was on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 an hour later, and he wasn't just being cute when he alluded to Donald Trump's steady diet of cable news: "Because Donald Trump is probably watching right now, let me just say, with all due respect, Mr. Trump, you are president-elect of the United States. You are looking and acting as if you are mean and petty, thin-skinned, and vindictive. Stop this. This is not a fireside chat, this is not what FDR did, this isn't lifting people up. This is actually penalizing people for speaking their minds."

Reich brought up not just the Jones tweet but also Trump's tweet-criticizing Boeing (right after its CEO said Trump was wrong about foreign trade), SNL, and individual journalists. "What you would like, Mr. Trump, is for no one — not a CEO, nobody on television, no journalist, nobody — to criticize you," he said — which to be fair, is probably a pretty universal sentiment. But Reich also noted the Trump-specific stakes: "Well, you are going to be president very shortly. You are going to have at your command not just Twitter but also the CIA, the IRS, the FBI. If you have this kind of thin-skinned vindictiveness attitude toward anybody who criticizes you, we are in very deep trouble, and sir, so are you." Watch below.

Jones, who represents the employees at the Carrier factory and other plants in Indiana, had said that Trump lied about the number of jobs being saved when he took credit for the deal — Trump said that 1,100 jobs slated to move to Mexico will be kept in Indiana, when the real number is about 800 — and pointed out that his union is still losing 550 jobs at the factory while Carrier gets $7 million in tax breaks.

When someone called Jones on his flip-phone to tell him that Trump was criticizing him on Twitter, "my first thought was, 'Well, that's not very nice,'" he told The Washington Post on Wednesday night. "Then, 'Well, I might not sleep much tonight.'" Then the threatening calls started coming in. Jones said his focus now is trying to keep the spirits of his workers up, since many of them are still getting laid off. As for Trump, "he needs to worry about getting his Cabinet filled," Jones said, "and leave me the hell alone."

Trump followed up his first tweet with some unsolicited advice from management to labor: "If United Steelworkers 1999 was any good, they would have kept those jobs in Indiana. Spend more time working-less time talking. Reduce dues." The New Yorker's James Surowiecki offers an alternate explanation for why United Steelworkers is losing union jobs:

I guess if American steelworkers just worked harder, Trump would have bought his steel from them. https://t.co/flT7f9FmEo

President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Linda McMahon, co-founder and former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) and one-time Senate candidate, to head the Small Business Administration, transition team officials said Wednesday. "Linda has a tremendous background and is widely recognized as one of the country's top female executives advising businesses around the globe," Trump said in an announcement, noting McMahon's success in growing WWE from 13 people to 800.

McMahon called small businesses "the largest source of job creation in our country" in a statement, and said her goal would be to ensure those businesses "grow and thrive," Reutersreported. Trump also mentioned she would be vital to his push to reduce federal regulations.

Aside from her failed 2010 bid for a U.S. Senate seat in Connecticut, McMahon has not had extensive government experience. However, her ties to Trump go way back: She was a supporter of Trump's presidential campaign from the start, and her husband, Vince McMahon, once got his head shaved by the now president-elect at Wrestlemania XXIII — right after Trump bodyslammed him to the ground and pretended to punch him in the head.

Last month, the U.S. exported more natural gas than it imported for the first time in almost 60 years. The country exported 7.4 billion cubic feet of liquefied gas a day in November, compared to the 7 billion cubic feet it imported daily, The Wall Street Journal reports.

American gas exports have jumped more than 50 percent since 2010, and the Department of Energy expects the U.S. to become the third-largest exporter of liquefied natural gas by 2020, behind Australia and Qatar. The two biggest U.S. customers are Canada and Mexico, who are partnered with the U.S. through the North American Free Trade Agreement. Plans to export to other partners, like South Korea and Singapore, are already in the works.

While two-thirds of Americans think President-elect Donald Trump needs to draw a clear line between his business and his presidential duties, most don't think he needs to resort to selling his business to do so. A Bloomberg Politics poll released Wednesday revealed that 69 percent of Americans "believe it goes too far to force him and his family to sell their business empire to avoid conflicts of interest." Only 26 percent think Trump should sell his business.

Many experts, however, think Trump needs to do more than just hand his business over to his children if he wants to steer clear of potential conflicts of interest. In an editorial published last month, The Wall Street Journalargued Trump's should "liquidate his stake" in the Trump organization, otherwise "political damage to a new administration could be extensive." Bloomberg View editor Tim O'Brien also made the case for why Trump should sell his business — a move O'Brien argued would be surprisingly easy to make.

At this point, 51 percent of Americans say they're confident Trump will "put the nation's best interests ahead of his family's finances when he deals with foreign leaders." Trump is planning a Dec. 15 news conference to discuss the topic, and he's already indicated on Twitter that he'll be leaving his "great business in total" to focus on being commander-in-chief, though selling doesn't seem to be part of the plan.

The Bloomberg poll was conducted among 999 Americans from Dec. 2-5. Its margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

When Democrats wrote the Affordable Care Act over 14 months, they carefully balanced the needs of the various sectors in the health care industry, and the American Hospital Association and the Federation of American Hospitals argued in a Washington, D.C., press conference that the flood of uninsured patients would cause massive losses at hospitals. If it repeals the law, the hospital industry said, Congress needs to step in with financial aid. The groups, citing a study, estimated that based on the only ObamaCare repeal law Congress has passed (and Obama vetoed), 22 million more people will be uninsured in a decade, and the strain to hospitals from those patients would be "unsettling," as FAH president Charles Kahn III said.

Republicans have put together a repeal vote that can pass with a simple majority in the Senate, avoiding a Democratic filibuster, but any replacement legislation would need Democratic assent.

Macroeconomic policy is for losers. Real presidents don't care about that stuff — they do deals, terrific deals, deals with so much winning you're gonna get bored of all the winning.

And that, my friends, appears to be how the next president of the United States will make our economy great again. In other words, as president he's going to give us exactly what he promised during the campaign: a compelling if simplistic show, based not on facts and details, on policies and adjustments to market forces, but on one man's will.

We saw it in action with Trump's "deal" to keep some jobs at two Carrier factories in Indiana from moving to Mexico. After intervention from the president-elect and his running mate, who also happens to be the state's governor, the company agreed not to send 2,000 jobs to Mexico as it had planned. In exchange they got $7 million in tax breaks, and more importantly, avoided a PR nightmare and the possibility that some of their parent company's ample defense contracts might be endangered.

For his part, Trump got terrific headlines, great pictures posing with happy Carrier employees, and the ability to trumpet to all who would listen that he had saved 1,100 jobs. As it happens, he wasn't telling the truth about that (shocking, I know) — the number of jobs slated to go to Mexico that will be staying is actually 800. Which is great for those 800 people, but doesn't do much for the economy overall.

But the Carrier deal embodied everything about how Trump said he'd bring us to that economic paradise. It wasn't about large, impersonal market forces, just one guy, sitting across a table from some other guys, telling them what's what and getting results. In one poll, 60 percent of respondents said it made them feel more favorably toward Trump.

But it can't be much of a model for Trump once he takes office. For him to equal the 15 million jobs that have been created since the Great Recession bottomed out in 2010, he'd have to to what he did with Carrier a mere 18,750 more times, or once a day for 51 years. And since those would be just jobs saved and not new ones created...well, you get the idea.

That's not the point, though. As Trump may or may not understand, most of what happens in the economy is outside the president's control. Presidents get more credit than they deserve when things go well and more blame than they deserve when things go poorly. And while Trump may find some more photo ops to have, there's only so much he'll be able to do directly, only so many firms threatening to move jobs overseas and willing to be talked out of it.

Trump says he wants to slap a 35 percent tariff on the goods of any company that moves jobs overseas, but Republicans in Congress don't like the sound of that, and he can't target specific companies in that way without their approval. He can try to renegotiate trade deals, but that won't produce the manufacturing explosion in the industrial Midwest that he promised, since most of the manufacturing jobs we lost in the last few decades disappeared not because of foreign competition, but because of automation. He can pull back environmental regulations, but that won't revive the coal industry — its biggest problem is competition from cheap natural gas, and Trump also wants to expand the fracking that brought natural gas prices so low.

Trump should get credit for one thing: He understood that the way to sell an economic program is to simplify it, to talk about jobs, jobs, jobs — and not just any jobs, but high-paying, secure jobs that don't require a lot of experience and education. That's part of why he described the future he'd create as a reversion to the 1950s and 1960s, where you could graduate high school, go down to the factory, and get a job with good wages and benefits on which you could raise a family.

There were a lot of things he left out about that picture, like the fact that it's automation that has made those kinds of jobs so much harder to find, or that the wages and benefits were so good back then because unions were so much stronger than they are now — and that he and Republicans in Congress will be doing everything they can to destroy collective bargaining once and for all. He also didn't spend a lot of time detailing the substance of their economic program, which is essentially the same set of trickle-down policies Republicans always advocate, including gargantuan tax cuts for the wealthy and the evisceration of regulations on Wall Street.

To excited Trump voters — particularly those in the white working class in key states in the Midwest — none of that mattered. What did matter was the picture Trump painted of an economic and cultural restoration, brought about through the irresistible force of his will.

He won't be able to deliver a return to labor-intensive, high-wage manufacturing, any more than he'll be able to roll back the clock on the increasing diversity of American society and culture. But it's possible, as Jeff Spross pointed out, that if he can avoid screwing up the economy the way Republicans usually do, things could chug along and keep improving, and four years from now Americans might be quite pleased with his performance.

Either way, he'll be governing mostly through photo-ops, simple messages, and a healthy menu of outright lies, even more than most presidents do. How long can he get away with it? There's no way to know yet, but if you're waiting for the voters who supported him to realize he can't deliver what he promised and turn on him, it may take a while.

Imagine, just for a moment, that President-elect Donald Trump's savvy "deal-making" (read: the veiled threat of government retaliation) with U.S. manufacturers like Carrier can keep 1,000 jobs a day from heading overseas. That works out to roughly 1.5 million jobs over his four-year presidential term. Let's even throw in a couple dozen 50,000-jobs packages like the one Trump apparently secured from SoftBank Group Corp. CEO Masayoshi Son to make it a nice, round 2.5 million jobs.

Now, this assumes a good chunk of President Trump's time is spent haggling over the phone. Which might be just fine with Vice President Mike Pence, House Speaker Paul Ryan, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. If Trump is talking, then he's not tweeting. And they could run the federal government while Trump is busy making America great again.

But instead of cajoling factory bosses or trying to rework 25-year-old trade deals, a modern, forward-looking American president would take note of Amazon Go, the online retailer's new brick-and-mortar grocery store project. Walk in, flash your phone, then grab and go. It's "frictionless," meaning no human cashiers to deal with. So what does this portend for the nation's 3.5 million cashiers?

Along the same lines, what do autonomous vehicles mean for the nation's nearly 3 million truck drivers? Toss in taxi and bus drivers, and it's another million jobs. Indeed, most of the decline in factory jobs has been due to automation rather than offshoring to cheaper labor markets overseas. Indeed, "now the chief executive of United Technologies, Carrier's parent company, says in the end, many of those jobs (he put the figure at 800) likely will fall to automation rather than Mexico," says The New York Times.

There are lots of competing forecasts about how automation will gobble up American jobs. A recent McKinsey analysis of job automation risk found nearly half of current job tasks could be automated "using already demonstrated technology" — but fewer than 5 percent of jobs could be entirely automated. The caveat here, as with all such analyses, is that emerging technologies could change these calculations and make more jobs vulnerable. Regardless, it seems safe to say that smart robots and software will at least do more and more routine or repetitive bits of jobs, hopefully allowing workers more time to focus on the creative, design, or emotion-driven parts of their work.

Robots do not mean "The End of Jobs," as a New York Post headline about Amazon Go screamed. An OECD automation report notes that new technologies "may also exert positive effects on labor demand if they raise product demand due to an improved competitiveness and a positive effect on workers' incomes." Technology can make us more productive and valuable — and create more jobs. When automatic teller machines came along, everyone assumed bank tellers would vanish. They actually kept increasing, though at a slower pace. As James Bessen explains in Learning by Doing: The Real Connection between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth, although banks slashed the number of tellers at their branches, they opened more branches since each one became cheaper to operate.

Of course, advancing automation will pose challenges. The Industrial Revolution worked out pretty well in the end, but it was a wrenching transformation for workers. We need to prepare now by making sure we have a high-innovation, high-wage economy where technological advances create new sorts of jobs and industries, not just replace current ones with machines. And we need to make sure we have a workforce ready to fill these jobs, and a modernized safety net for when they aren't.

Yet here we are, obsessing about globalization and trade deficits. Or about the illegal immigration of low-skilled workers. These are yesterday's problems.

Economist Adam Ozimek at Moody's Analytics notes that the China trade shock "has largely passed. Trade with China is mostly liberalized now, and the worst trade-related job losses are behind us." Same goes for low-skill immigration. Even assuming this has been bad for some American workers, "wages have risen and fertility rates have fallen in the poorest Mexican states that have sent the most immigrants in recent years, and this has already reduced migration rates."

Some people get it. After Trump trumpeted his Carrier deal, Sen. Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican who has long been critical of Trump, let go with a reality-check tweetstorm. Among the highlights:

Automation--even more than trade--will continue to shrink the number of manufacturing jobs. This trend is irreversible. https://t.co/HASJOIK4x3

What if industrial policy — a national strategy to promote certain industries or sectors of the economy — never went away? What if it can't go away? And what if Donald Trump is about to make it much, much worse?

Trump and Mike Pence recently cut a deal to save several hundred jobs that Carrier, a manufacturer of air conditioners and gas furnaces, had planned to relocate from Pence's home state of Indiana to Mexico. It was a minor public-relations coup, to be sure, but questionable on the merits. On this, economists on the left and right largely agreed, if for different reasons.

Center-left economists like Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary, warned that the nature of the deal portends a transition from "rule of law capitalism" to the "ad hoc deal-based capitalism" of authoritarian regimes like China. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote: "Trump has endangered the jobs of workers who were previously safe in the United States. Why? Because he has signaled to every corporation in America that they can threaten to offshore jobs in exchange for business-friendly tax benefits and incentives." (Trump has since threatened to impose a retributive 35-percent tariff on companies that move abroad, but he offered no details, he can't do so unilaterally, and Congress is not likely to go along.)

Many conservatives fell back on time-honored free-market rhetoric: that is, government shouldn't be in the business of picking winners and losers in the marketplace. Sarah Palin derided the Carrier deal as "crony capitalism." The Wall Street Journal editorial board called it a "shakedown" and asked: "[W]ho would you rather have making a decision about where to make furnaces or cars? A company whose profitability depends on making good decisions, or a branding executive turned politician who wants to claim political credit?" National Review's Jonah Goldberg worried that the deal signaled "that industrial policy is back."

Don't call it a comeback. Industrial policy has been here for years.

In his book The Betrayal of American Prosperity, former Reagan administration trade official Clyde Prestowitz argues that the United States has long pursued a national economic strategy. It just happens to be a patchwork of industrial policies that no one consciously adopted but that, nonetheless, is the direct result of federal spending and regulations.

For the last 30 years, writes Prestowitz, America's industrial policy has looked something like this:

It is to overconsume, and to promote weapons production, financial services, construction, medical research and services, agriculture, and oil and gas consumption and production. Further, it is both to offshore production and provision of all tradable manufacturing and services as well as, increasingly, high-technology R&D, and to expand the domestic retail, food service, and personal medical services industries. At the macro level, the strategy is to run up massive debt and borrow as much and as long as possible. [The Betrayal of American Prosperity]

Did lawmakers or administration officials consciously and coherently choose to adopt this suite of policies? No. But Prestowitz asserts that such a lack of premeditation doesn't mean the United states eschews industrial policy. It just means we have lousy and often wasteful industrial policy.

In Concrete Economics: The Hamilton Approach to Economic Growth and Policy, Stephen Cohen and Brad DeLong dispel the notion that industrial policy is tantamount to command-and-control dirigiste economics. "We do not propose the content of such a redesign, complete with dubious numerical targets," they write. "That is not how it happened in the successful American past." Concrete Economics points not only to the most cited examples of government-promoted development — from railroads to the internet — but to concatenations of industrial policy that had far-reaching socioeconomic effects.

After World War II, for example, government promotion of affordable long-term mortgages led to suburbs, which led to more highways and cars and washing machines and furniture. All this growth was underpinned by a "steadily growing and secure market for mortgages and automobile loans; and municipal bonds for infrastructure and schools to please the regulated and respectable finance industry."

Industrial policy goes wrong, according to Cohen and DeLong, when it's conducted in the "speculative realms of ideology and its handmaiden theoretical abstractions." Prime example: The bipartisan unleashing of the financial services industry, which begat the Great Recession. When it goes right, industrial policy is "image-able, as in, 'This is the kind of thing we will get.' "

Which brings us back to Trump, Pence, and Carrier.

Where do they think their industrial policy will take us? Do they have a vision of where the American economy should be heading (like, say, President Obama's green-energy policies)? It's obvious that Trump is asking no such questions. He's simply attempting to preserve in economic amber the labor-intensive manufacturing robustness of his nostalgia-added imagination. And he's privileging manufacturing jobs over jobs in the service industry for no sound economic reason.

As FiveThirtyEight's Ben Casselman writes: "A combination of bribes and threats may have saved Carrier workers' jobs — and still only some of them — but it isn't going to bring back the glory days of American manufacturing. Nothing will. The forces that have driven the decline in U.S. factory employment — globalization and automation — are here to stay."

In other words, Trump will no more be able to bring back the economy of 1950 than he will the social and racial hierarchy of 1950.

Breitbart News mocked "climate alarmists" last week in an article observing that "global land temperatures have plummeted by one degree Celsius since the middle of this year." The article is led by a video from The Weather Channel, and The Weather Channel is none too happy about it.

"Note to Breitbart," the website responded Tuesday. "The Earth is not cooling, climate change is real, and please stop using our video to mislead Americans."

The Weather Channel explained that their video is "unrelated" to Breitbart's claims and added that the Breitbart article is "a prime example of cherry picking, or pulling a single item out of context to build a misleading case." The station then proceeded to break down the claims and truths of the article.

"Finally, to our friends at Breitbart: The next time you write a climate change article and need fact-checking help, please call," The Weather Channel wrote. "We're here for you. I'm sure we both agree this topic is too important to get wrong." Read their full, blistering takedown here.

President-elect Donald Trump emerged from a meeting with SoftBank Group Corp. CEO Masayoshi Son on Tuesday with news he'd secured "a $50 billion investment in the United States and 50,000 jobs" from the Japanese billionaire, per a pool report. "I just came to celebrate his new job," Son said, referring to Trump's pending assumption of the presidency, before confirming he would make jobs by investing in American start-ups. "I said, 'This is great, the U.S. will become great again.'"

Trump called Son one of the "great men of industry" and was quick to celebrate the deal on Twitter:

Outside of Japan, Son is known for his purchase of American phone carrier Sprint in 2013. Son recently attempted to craft a merger between Sprint and T-Mobile, but The New York Timesreported those efforst have "so far resulted mostly in red ink."

Son reportedly said he had "no specific agenda" for his meeting with Trump on Tuesday.

President-elect Donald Trump's tweet Tuesday criticizing Boeing prompted his spokesman Jason Miller to reveal Trump "sold all of his stocks back in June." Miller's claim — which The Washington Post noted did not include specifics on why or how Trump sold his stockholdings — came amid questions about whether Trump still had his shares in Boeing, an investment he'd tweeted about back in January 2013:

.@Boeing stock went way down because of 787- so I just bought stock in @Boeing- great company!

Miller, however, added that his claim was "referring broadly to all of Mr. Trump's stock, not Boeing specifically," The Wall Street Journal reported. Miller's comment Tuesday marked the first time Trump's campaign has mentioned anything about the president-elect ridding himself of his entire portfolio, the purported June timing of which would coincide "with a point when Trump was pouring money into his presidential campaign," The Washington Post reported.

Trump's remarks about the cost of Boeing's new Air Force One — which briefly drove the company's stocks down — is not the first time the president-elect's investments have raised questions about potential conflicts of interest. A financial disclosure in May revealed that, as of December 2015, Trump had shares "in a number of banks, oil giants, and other companies with business pending before the U.S. government and whose value could rise due to Trump's decisions in office," the Post reported.

No documents have been provided since the May filing that could serve to substantiate Miller's claims. Legally, Trump won't have to release another personal financial disclosure until May 2018.

Liberal political operative David Brock is gearing up for four years of Donald Trump, and he plans to remold his media networks into anti-Trump weaponry in preparation. Media Matters, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and the social media platform Shareblue will all be refocusing in anticipation of the incoming administration, The Hill reports.

Specifically, Brock is looking for financial investment for Shareblue, which he believes could become the "Breitbart of the left" if it finds backing. Brock is also looking to the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch as a template for how CREW might operate, and he plans to steer Media Matters' focus away from Fox News to zero in on fake news, conspiracy theories, and hoaxes.

Additionally, Brock's super PAC, American Bridge, is prepared to comb through Trump's history, use the Freedom of Information Act to uncover new stories, and fact-check his claims in real time. The group will feed its potential findings to the media, lawmakers, and Trump's supporters, The Hill reports.

"The Trump administration is shaping up to be one of the most corrupt since the Gilded Age," Brock said. "American Bridge will use everything at its disposal to hold it accountable."

Former Sen. Bob Dole admitted Monday that he "may have had some influence" on the controversial phone call between President-elect Donald Trump and Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen. Public filings show that Dole is paid $20,000 a month to advance Taiwan's interests in Washington, BuzzFeed News reported Tuesday.

Trump's decision last week to accept the congratulatory phone call was a sharp break with diplomatic norms. American and Taiwanese leaders are last known to have spoken directly in 1979 as the United States does not formally recognize Taiwan as an independent nation, separate from China.

BuzzFeed News found that none of the documents it reviewed between Dole's client, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (TECRO), and his firm suggest that TECRO explicitly asked Dole to arrange the conversation between Trump and the Taiwanese president. But a March 17 letter from Dole to Taiwan's former top representative in Washington, Lyu-shun Shen, stated that "through close coordination with your staff, we are also prepared to undertake other special assignments on your behalf, provided that they are mutually agreed to by both parties."

The letter also includes Dole's assurance that "this year, we agree that our activities will continue to focus specially [sic] on assisting you with [your] agenda as it relates to the U.S. administration and Congress."

Residents of Trump Tower have access to the usual list of luxury building amenities, including a full-time doorman, valet, and maid service. Only, tenants now have access to an amenity even some of the poshest buildings in the country can't boast — the U.S. Secret Service.

"The New [Amenity] — The United States Secret Service," bragged a flier obtained by Politico that promotes a one-bedroom apartment on the 31st floor of the tower. "Best value in the most secure building in Manhattan," it adds. Another advertisement for an available condo asked, "Fifth Avenue buyers interested in Secret Service protection?"

Most of Trump Tower's units are individually owned, and business associates promoting the "Secret Service" as an amenity are not tied directly to Trump. Politico reports that there are apparently 16 active sale listings and 16 active rentals in the building.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has said security for Trump costs the city about $500,000 a day and that protecting Trump Tower is an "unprecedented" challenge, requiring street closures, 24-hour security, and barricades. While Trump will move in January to the White House in D.C., his wife, Melania, and son, Barron, plan to stay in Trump Tower so Barron can finish school. They will have their own security detail.

Google announced Tuesday that it plans to rely entirely on renewable energy sources to power its 13 data centers and 150 global offices in 2017. Though Google will not solely use sources like wind and solar power, given that it receives power from a company operating a multi-source energy grid, its consumption of non-renewable energy will be offset entirely by its purchase of renewable energy.

The move is significant, as Google reportedly gobbled up "as much energy as the city of San Francisco" last year. Already, the company says it is the "largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in the world," sourcing 44 percent of its energy from renewable sources in 2015. "For one company to be doing this is a very big deal. It means other companies of a similar scale will feel pressure to move," Jonathan Koomey, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance, told The New York Times.

Moreover, Google argues the environment isn't all that's benefiting from its green investment. "We are convinced this is good for business, this is not about greenwashing," Marc Oman, EU energy lead at Google, told The Guardian. "This is about locking in prices for us in the long term. Increasingly, renewable energy is the lowest cost option."

When Donald Trump promised to save 1,100 jobs in the Carrier deal last week, he was apparently inflating the number with jobs that were never threatened in the first place, WTHR reports. The Carrier deal had the air conditioner and furnace manufacturer agreeing to keep hundreds of jobs in Indiana that had been slated to go to Mexico in return for $7 million in state financial incentives — but while Trump had promised 1,100 jobs would be saved, the reality is that only 730 union jobs are apparently being preserved.

"We didn't know the breakdown before because no one would give us any information. Now what we're losing is 550 member jobs," Union President Chuck Jones said. Carrier worker T.J. Bray added, "It seemed like since Thursday, it was 1,100 then it was maybe 900 and then now we're at 700. So I'm hoping it doesn't go any lower than that."

The union workers learned that Trump's deal saves 730 jobs in Indianapolis, and that 553 jobs in the plant's fan coil lines are being moved to Mexico. All 700 workers at Carrier's Huntington plant will additionally lose their jobs. Trump had apparently arrived at the 1,100 number he boasted last week by including 350 research and development jobs that were never going to go to Mexico in the first place, Bray explained.

"It appears they may have hyped that number [1,100] a little bit and then once the company and everything settled down we started seeing the real numbers and started getting a little discouraged about how many jobs [were really being saved]," Bray said.

A single tweet from President-elect Donald Trump had immediate real-world implications Tuesday morning, when shortly before the markets opened, Trump criticized Boeing for how expensive its new 747 Air Force One plane is:

Boeing is building a brand new 747 Air Force One for future presidents, but costs are out of control, more than $4 billion. Cancel order!

He expanded upon that tweet in New York on Tuesday morning, saying "the plane is totally out of control. It's going to be over $4 billion for Air Force One program," he said, per CNBC. "I think it's ridiculous, I think Boeing is doing a little bit of a number. We want Boeing to make a lot of money, but not that much money."

At the mere threat of Trump canceling his order on the latest model of the presidential jet, Boeing's stock plummeted. At Tuesday's opening bell, Boeing stocks were down 0.86 percent and had slid more than 1 percent in early trading. Though that may not sound all that steep, with a market cap at $93 billion, even a 1 percent decline is significant for Boeing.

Moreover, Politico reported, Trump's tweet seems to have misquoted the actual projected cost of the Boeing 747. Air Force One estimated it would cost $1.65 billion to build two new jets — about $825 million per aircraft.

When asked for comment by The Associated Press, Boeing spokesman Todd Blecher indicated the company still wasn't quite sure how to respond to the president-elect's tweet. "We are going to get back to you after we figure out what's going on," Blecher said.

After a 2015 internal study requested by Pentagon leaders suggested that $125 billion was spent on administrative waste in its business operations, the report was quickly hidden over concerns Congress might use the information to cut the defense budget, The Washington Post reports.

Through interviews and confidential memos, the Post discovered that the point of the study was to make the Pentagon's back-office bureaucracy more efficient, and the money saved would then be reinvested in combat power. The Defense Business Board, looking at personnel and cost data, found that the Pentagon was spending $134 billion of its $580 billion budget on overhead and operations like human resources, accounting, and property management. More than 1 million people work in business operations, nearly as many as the 1.3 million active-duty troops. The report recommended early retirements and attrition, making better use of information technology, and cutting back on expensive contractors in order to save $125 billion over five years, the Post says. It did not suggest any layoffs of civil servants or reductions in military personnel.

This report didn't go over well with some Pentagon leaders, who had no idea how much money was being spent on these operations and worried that by showcasing administrative waste, Congress and the White House might slash their budget, the Post says. A summary report had been made public, but was removed from the Pentagon's website, and they placed secrecy restrictions on the data. "They're all complaining that they don't have any money," Bobby Stein, who served as chairman of the Defense Business Board, told the Post. "We proposed a way to save a ton of money." He called the data "indisputable," and said it was a "travesty" for the Pentagon to keep the results hidden. "We're going to be in peril because we're spending dollars like it doesn't matter."

Deputy Defense Secretary Robert O. Work, the second-highest-ranking official at the Pentagon, told the Post he didn't dispute the findings about the size and scope of the Pentagon's bureaucracy, but said the $125 billion savings proposal was "unrealistic" and the board did not understand how difficult it would be to cut so many federal civil service jobs. Read more about the report, how it was developed, and Defense Secretary Ash Carter's reaction to it at The Washington Post.

Stephen Moore, economic adviser to President-elect Donald Trump, couldn't care less about what China thinks. In an interview on the Chicago-based Big John and Ray radio show, Moore applauded Trump's controversial phone call with Taiwan on Friday — even if it does rock the boat on U.S. relations with China. "I love the fact that Trump did that," Moore said. "Too many mamby-pamby people in the foreign policy shop are saying, 'Oh my gosh we can't do this, we might insult the Chinese.' I don't care if we insult the Chinese!"

When Trump spoke with Taiwan's president, he broke with the decades-long U.S. policy against officially recognizing Taiwan's government as an entity separate from China's governing body. Beijing considers Taiwan to be a province of the mainland. On Monday, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest credited the One-China policy with "preserving peace and stability in the Strait" and argued the policy benefits both the U.S. and Taiwan — especially as China is projected to overtake the U.S. as the world's largest economy by 2018.

But Moore seemed to suggest Trump's support of Taiwan is what would really be beneficial. "Taiwan is our ally," Moore said. "That is a country that we have backed because they believe in freedom. We ought to back our ally, and if China doesn't like it, screw 'em."

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced Sunday that it would not grant an easement permitting the construction of the highly controversial Dakota Access Pipeline under North Dakota's Lake Oahe, the Missouri River reservoir. The pending construction had sparked months of protests organized by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. The denial is news that might not sit so well with President-elect Donald Trump, though, as he owns stock in the company building the pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners.

Trump and many other Republicans, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, have supported finishing the pipeline, which is nearly completed. While the denied easement will allow for the exploration of alternative routes away from the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, Trump's administration could allow for the pipeline to be built along the original route, The New York Times reports.

Trump has claimed that his support for the Dakota Access Pipeline is not tied to his stake in Energy Transfer Partners. Nevertheless, supporters of the pipeline are hopeful about President Barack Obama's impending exit from the White House. "With President-elect Trump set to take office in 47 days, we are hopeful that this is not the final word on the Dakota Access Pipeline," Craig Stevens, a spokesman for the pro-infrastructure group MAIN Coalition, told The New York Times.

Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski are reportedly in touch with Donald Trump several times a week despite the president-elect not having appeared on the show in months, Politico reports. The morning show hosts were criticized for having a cozy relationship with Trump during the Republican primary and general election, and are now being blasted for becoming "transition spokesmen," in the words of CNN's Chris Cuomo and others alarmed by the ethics of the relationship.

"With Trump, only those most willing to essentially, if unofficially, join the team themselves will get continued, dependable access,” Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan has said.

The Morning Joe hosts claim they have never held back on their criticism of Trump, with Scarborough telling Politico "we're just as blunt in person as we are on TV, whether we happened to be critical on the show that particular day or not." Scarborough claimed he talks with Trump "a few times a week," and Politico added that Brzezinski visited Trump Tower last week to meet with Ivanka Trump over coffee.

Scarborough defended his relationship with Trump, saying he and his team weren't playing favorites. "This is nothing new for Mika and me," he told Politico. "We spoke regularly to Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod in the Obama White House, and we have always maintained good relations with congressional leaders and Cabinet secretaries. Most of them watch the show and call us if they have an issue they want to discuss."

Friday's jobs report was more evidence of the kind of slow, plodding improvement we've grown accustomed to since the end of the Great Recession. But now that Donald Trump is about to become president, what happens if the slow, plodding improvement keeps up? The answer is a nightmare for Democrats: Come 2020, Trump could be very popular.

Political science suggests the economy is enormously important in predicting how an election will swing. In fact, the most stupidly simple models of Americans' voting behavior — the ones that account for the economy, which party is incumbent in the White House, Americans' natural tendency to change course, and little else — predicted the outcome of the 2016 election just fine. In fact, they were saying Trump was the likely victor months ago. It's just no one believed them.

Now, according to the models, it's the rate at which the economy improves, especially in the year prior to the election, that really matters. That rate did speed up noticeably in 2015. But it wasn't enough to save the Democrats. If things stay as they are, that rate might not help Trump/Pence 2020 much either.

At the same time, it seems weird to assume the overallhealth of the economy doesn't matter at all. Four years of improvement at this rate will result in a much healthier economy, and one much closer to what Americans have historically associated with prosperity.

All of which certainly isn't a slam dunk case that Trump will waltz back into the White House in 2020. But it certainly seems like a plausible case.

To which you might ask: What about that looming recession I keep hearing about? Well, the biggest reason economists all have their eyes peeled for one is just historical precedent. Recessions in the modern era have tended to hit every 8 to 10 years. So if past is prologue, we're due for one. But there's not really much in the way of concrete evidence that a recession is looming on the horizon.

Since 1980, recessions have been driven by bubbles that pop. The two obvious candidates for a new bubble are student loans and auto loans. But while both problems are doing a lot of damage to Americans' livelihoods, they have nowherenear the scale or market reach of either the 2001 tech bubble or the 2008 housing bubble. Their internal dynamics are also different: They're unlikely to unravel and bring down the whole economy, the way the dotcom bust or the housing crisis did.

So again, it's not a slam dunk case that we won't see a bubble and recession in the next four years. But the possibility we avoid one is very real.

This means if Trump and the Republicans want to win in 2020, doing absolutely nothing between now and then would actually be a pretty smart strategy. More realistically, if Trump just pulls off some publicity stunts while not doing anything substantive to affect the economy, he might be in a very strong position. Think the recent Carrier deal or even building the Mexican-border wall. (At the same time, we don't actually know how the U.S. populace would react if it actually got a taste of hardcore white nationalist policy in action — but the 2016 election results are not promising.)

The great hope for Democrats, then, is that their opponents will do something about the economy. Because most of what the GOP is talking about doing would bea disaster. Passing House Speaker Paul Ryan's budget would gut government aid and public investment, sucking huge amounts of aggregate demand out of the economy. Trump's tax cuts would allow the rich to claim bigger slices of the wealth generated by businesses, making wage stagnation for everyone else more likely. If Trump and the Senate GOP fill the Federal Reserve's two open seats or replace Fed Chair Janet Yellen with inflation hawks, the Fed might hike interest rates faster, thereby depressing the economy.

Of course, Trump was all over the place in terms of policy during the campaign. So maybe he'll fight Ryan's budget. Maybe he'll work with the Democrats to pass an infrastructure bill that isn't useless corporate giveaways. But presidents tend to dance with the party that brung 'em.

If the Democrats want to win again in 2020, their best hope — and it's a very reasonable hope — is that Trump and the Republicans sabotage themselves.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Sunday announced it will not grant an easement permitting construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline under North Dakota's Lake Oahe, the Missouri River reservoir which has led to months of protests organized by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe.

"Although we have had continuing discussion and exchanges of new information with the Standing Rock Sioux and Dakota Access, it's clear that there's more work to do," said Army Assistant Secretary for Civil Works Jo-Ellen Darcy. "The best way to complete that work responsibly and expeditiously is to explore alternate routes for the pipeline crossing."

The federal government also ordered the protesters to leave their main camp by Monday, though authorities do not plan to forcibly remove the protesters if they refuse to go voluntarily. The Corps will now conduct an environmental impact review to determine if the proposed pipeline can be rerouted so it does not cross the Missouri. Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the oil pipeline, did not immediately comment on the news.

Once in office, President-elect Donald Trump will decide whether to interfere with companies considering outsourcing 'on a day-by-day basis," Vice President-elect Mike Pence said Sunday. "He is going to put on the table all the tools that are going to take away the advantages of companies that for far too long have been pulling up stakes, leaving American workers behind," Pence explained while speaking with ABC News. "We're going to create trade policies that take away the advantages that these multinational corporations have had in moving jobs overseas now for decades."

Trump himself sent out a series of tweets on the issue Sunday morning, promising a 35 percent tax to discourage would-be outsourcers. "Please be forewarned prior to making a very expensive mistake!" Trump concluded. "THE UNITED STATES IS OPEN FOR BUSINESS" — you know, like the Hotel California.

Watch Pence's comments in context beginning around the 4:40 mark in the video below.

In an interview with Meet the Press host Chuck Todd Sunday morning, Vice President-elect Mike Pence evaded questions about whether President-elect Donald Trump's deal with Carrier should be considered crony capitalism. "On Carrier, why isn't this pay-to-play politics?" Todd asked. "Some people would say you gave a tax break to Carrier so that they would only send 700 jobs overseas. Sarah Palin called it crony capitalism. Why isn't it?"

Pence's initial response contrasted his own unsuccessful attempts as governor of Indiana to convince Carrier to keep production in the United States with Trump's effective negotiations. Then, as Todd pushed him to explain how the deal is not an example of "government intervening in the private sector," Pence shifted the conversation elsewhere, first to an expression of happiness about the American jobs that were saved in time for Christmas and then to complaints about negative media coverage. Watch the full exchange below.

Jared Kushner, the president-elect's reserved son-in-law, will play a major role in his administration. Here's everything you need to know about him:

Who is Jared Kushner?Ivanka Trump's husband is a real estate developer who, like Donald Trump, inherited a fortune from his father and grew it through daring deals. Kushner, 35, is worth an estimated $200 million. He's also one of Donald Trump's closest advisers and helped engineer his upset victory over Hillary Clinton. "The president-elect knows that the only person Jared is looking out for is the president-elect," says Jason Miller, communications director for Trump's transition team. "He doesn't have any other agendas or motives or fiefdoms. And in the world of politics, that's frequently hard to find." In stark contrast to his bombastic father-in-law, Kushner is reserved, modest, and unfailingly polite. Yet they are described as kindred spirits — men born to wealth who nonetheless see themselves as scorned outsiders with something to prove.

Why is that?Manhattan's cultural elite has long mocked Queens-born Trump for his gold-plated gaucherie. New Jersey native Kushner, on the other hand, has faced skepticism ever since Daniel Golden's 2006 book The Price of Admission, which suggested Kushner's father, Charles, used a $2.5 million donation to get Jared into Harvard University. "His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it," says an official at Kushner's high school. The book was the second humiliating blow Kushner had to absorb at a young age. The year before Golden's book came out, Kushner's father was sent to prison, after a scandalous trial involving a family feud, sex, and blackmail. (See below.) When Kushner took over his father's business, Kushner Companies, at age 24, he quickly set out to redeem his family's reputation and prove his own mettle.

What did he do?He expanded into New York City. "He knew early in his career that the way to become important was to get out of Jersey and become a Manhattan developer," says Mitchell Moss, urban planning professor at New York University. In 2007, Kushner put up $1.8 billion in mostly borrowed funds to purchase the 41-story office building at 666 Fifth Ave. — a near disaster when values plummeted after the 2008 financial crisis. But he has found enormous success by investing in office and residential buildings in SoHo, Brooklyn, and other hip, rising areas.

When did he meet Ivanka?A real estate broker introduced them and they began dating in 2007. "I feel really lucky to have met, like, a great New Jersey boy," Ivanka says. The stumbling block was religion — Ivanka was a Presbyterian and Kushner a devout Orthodox Jew whose parents hoped he'd marry within the faith. The conflict led to a 2008 breakup, but they got back together after Ivanka promised to convert to Judaism. Her future in-laws didn't make it easy, insisting on rigorous study of the Torah. "It was hard and difficult and it was on Charlie's terms," says former Observer Media president Bob Sommer. Ivanka passed the test, and they wed in 2009 at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Kushner and Ivanka have three children, keep the Sabbath, and often spend weekends with Jared's parents at their Jersey Shore mansion. "It was understood that marriage meant loyalty to their in-laws," says former Hollywood superagent Michael Ovitz, another mentor. "Incidentally, Jared discovered that he really liked Donald." When Trump ran for president, Kushner became deeply involved in the campaign.

How did that happen?Kushner says he became a true believer last November after watching Trump thrill a packed arena in Springfield, Illinois. "People really saw hope in his message," Kushner says. Convinced his father-in-law could win, he encouraged him to make better use of computer data and social media. Kushner called on friends in Silicon Valley, he says, and "had them give me a tutorial on how to use Facebook microtargeting." Last summer Kushner built a data hub, which gathered a trove of constituent information to identify possible Trump voters. The data pointed to momentum in the Rust Belt, prompting last-minute rallies and outreach that helped the Republican turn those states red. Kushner "managed to assemble a presidential campaign on a shoestring using new technology and won," says former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who assisted the Clinton campaign. "That's a big deal."

What role will he play now?He has already helped direct the transition as a liaison to his father-in-law, and reportedly helped orchestrate the ouster of original transition leader Chris Christie — the man who had prosecuted Kushner's father. Federal anti-nepotism laws may bar him from a paid post and perhaps even an unpaid one, but Trump has signaled Kushner will nonetheless play a key advisory role and become a formidable force in the Trump White House. Indeed, despite Kushner's utter lack of diplomatic experience, Trump suggests he might ask his son-in-law to broker an elusive Israeli-Palestinian peace. "I think he'd be very good at it," Trump says. "He knows the region, knows the people, knows the players."

His father's stint in jailA flamboyant developer, Charles Kushner, 62, was a major Democratic donor and one of New Jersey's premier power players. But he suffered a spectacular fall from grace. In 2001, his brother learned Charles had used family business partners to make political contributions without their consent. When Chris Christie, then U.S. attorney for New Jersey, launched an aggressive investigation, Charles blackmailed his sister to discourage her from cooperating: He paid a prostitute $10,000 to lure her husband to a motel room, and sent a videotape of the encounter to his sister. "It was like a Sopranos episode," says Kushner adversary Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club. Charles pleaded guilty to 18 felony counts, including making illegal campaign contributions and retaliating against a federal witness, and was sentenced to two years in an Alabama penitentiary. Jared Kushner took it hard. He visited Charles in prison every Sunday, and came to share his father's belief he'd been sold down the river by jealous relatives and the media. "I felt what happened was obviously unjust in terms of the way [prosecutors] pursued him," Jared says.

Ford Motor Company could be persuaded to halt outsourcing plans and keep manufacturing jobs here in the United States, executives indicated in interviews with Bloomberg and the Detroit Free Press on Friday. But if President-elect Donald Trump hopes to replicate his deal with Carrier, an air conditioning manufacturer that wanted to move some 2,100 jobs from Indiana to Mexico, he'll have to pony to Ford's demands.

"We will be very clear in the things we'd like to see," said Mark Fields, Ford's chief executive officer, to Bloomberg. High on his list are tax reform, free trade rules, and a relaxation of fuel economy regulations that have automakers producing more electric vehicles than they can sell. Fields argued Ford's position is not identical to Carrier's, as the automaker is repurposing its factories to build other models when it shifts some models' production abroad.

At the Detroit Free Press, Ford Chief Financial Officer Bob Shanks acknowledged that a call from the president-elect did influence Ford's recent decision to keep making a Lincoln SUV model in Kentucky. Shanks expressed hope that going forward, "there [is] some adjustment that can be made to the present regulatory framework that recognizes the market realities."

For more on whether the Carrier deal — and the inevitable subsequent demands from companies like Ford — was a terrific or terrible idea, check out The Week's dueling analyses.

About 2,000 U.S. military veterans calling themselves Veterans Stand for Standing Rock have amassed at the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, and hundreds more are expected to arrive this weekend. The veterans are building barracks for protesters to use as shelter from the frigid North Dakota winter and are volunteering to temporarily stand in for long-time protesters who need a break.

"We want to offer them a moment of peace and, if we can, take a little bit of pressure off," said Coast Guard veteran Ashleigh Jennifer Parker, labeling the militarized police response "unconstitutional." "People are being brutalized; concussion grenades are being thrown into crowds," she said. "They're spraying people, even old women, and other elders of the tribe with tear gas and pepper spray."

The veterans plan to stay at least through Dec. 7, though some may stick around longer.

Here are three of the week's top pieces of financial advice, gathered from around the web:

Endangered tax deductions Maximize your deductions now, said Laura Saunders at The Wall Street Journal, because "a Trump presidency means you could lose them." President-elect Donald Trump and House Republicans have both proposed plans to lower income-tax rates while reducing the value of many deductions and exemptions. Tax benefits for charitable donations, for example, "could get a haircut" next year, so donors should think about upping their gifts this December, especially major ones. Deductions for state and local taxes may also be coming to an end, meaning "it could make sense to pay 2016's remaining balances before year-end." The mortgage interest deduction could also shrink in the near future, "so don't buy a first or second home if you need the current law's benefits to afford it."

Auto insurance that works for youDoes your auto insurance company care about you, or its shareholders? asked Gretchen Morgenson at The New York Times. In a study of 300 auto insurers, data analytics firm Val-Choice found that so-called mutual insurance companies offer consumers a better value. Publicly traded companies like Geico, All-state, and Progressive "must satisfy both shareholders and policyholders," while mutual companies are owned by policyholders. Val​Choice's study found that dividend-paying mutual companies paid out an average 72.6 percent of their premiums in claims, compared with 64.5 percent for mutual companies that don't pay dividends and 62.8 percent for publicly held insurers. Most insurance shoppers focus on price, but claims-payment history arguably matters more. Essentially, "consumers who buy from companies whose claims payments are lower are paying for lesser coverage."

Aging parents, difficult conversationsThe time to talk to aging parents about their living situation is before a crisis happens, said Penelope Wang at Money. Most people prefer to stay in their own home for as long as they can, "but aging in place may not be a realistic option." Only one-third of owner-occupied homes are equipped with basic accessibility features, like a no-step entry or a first-floor bathroom. If you have concerns, don't start by dictating to your parents what they should do. Instead, get involved in small ways to better understand their financial health or living conditions, "such as bill paying or overseeing a home repair job." That can open the door to more difficult conversations later on.